Russian Ex-Finance Minister: West Shouldn't Overestimate 'Russian Threat'

"The Western position exaggerates the danger posed by Russia's present course," Kudrin stated, participating in a seminar organized by Finnish President Sauli Niinisto on Monday. 

Kudrin noted that the situation surrounding Ukraine is a special case for Russia, with its own particularities. He stated that Russia has felt a "phantom pain" from being separated from Ukraine, in the same way that a person who has been amputated feels pain long after the operation. In Kudrin's view, Ukrainian membership in NATO would be very difficult for Russia to accept.

Kudrin argued that NATO's reputation among Russians has deteriorated to Cold War levels over the past two decades as a result of the alliance's continued expansion eastward throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. He noted that if only five percent of Russians considered the US a danger immediately following the end of the Cold War, the wars in Kosovo and Iraq, the color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and elsewhere, and the expansion of the alliance gradually changed peoples' views. Today, in the ex-minister's view, 80 percent of Russians only expect new dirty tricks from the West, including the creation of a missile defense system.

The ex-finance minister noted that tensions with the alliance could stabilize and eventually decline if NATO halted its eastward expansion and provided Russia with some guarantees on this point.

"If Russia were to receive some sort of guarantee that NATO would not continue to expand, tensions would be reduced considerably and the Ukrainian problem would be much easier to solve," Kudrin noted.

Asked by President Niinisto whether such a guarantee would be a condition for peace in Donbass, Kudrin responded by noting that peace in Donbass depends first and foremost on compliance with the Minsk protocol. In his words, an agreement against further NATO expansion is a separate issue, related to Russia's relations with the West in general. 

Kudrin, generally considered one of Russia's foremost liberal political figures, served as the country's finance minister between 2000-2011.

Over the weekend, the Polish Defense Ministry announced that it was in talks with the US Defense Department about setting up military supply depots for US equipment and heavy weapons on Polish territory and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Russia vowed that it would respond to this "aggressive step" by reinforcing its defenses along its Western borders. Since the onset of the crisis in Ukraine last year, the US and NATO have dramatically increased the number of exercises in Eastern Europe.